Lyndon B. Johnson

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Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 -1973

Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, declared that he wanted to be "the President who helped the poor to find their own way," the "President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the peoples of all races, all regions and all parties." During his administration he would sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most comprehensive civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and his Great Society reforms would lead to lasting changes in education, medical care for the elderly, and social welfare.

The Vietnam War, however, would sink Johnson's presidency. Despite early doubts about the war, he would commit more and more troops to that conflict - which would eventually claim the lives of 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese. As the war ground on, with no end in sight, Johnson found himself increasingly under fire from both hawks and doves, the right and the left. On March 31, 1968, he announced he would not run for re-election.

Highlights From the Archives

''I DO understand power, whatever else may be said about me,'' Lyndon B. Johnson once explained. ''I know where to look for it, and how to use it.'' As the Senate majority leader, Johnson consummately brokered power as a legislator (''Master of the Senate,'' the latest installment in Robert A. Caro's multi-volume biography, is being published this month). Later, as president, Johnson perfected his use of power and also found its exercise more problematic.

For all his achievements, Lyndon B. Johnson is still remembered mainly as the president who presided over the wretched war in Vietnam, the most loathed in American history. But this week John Kenneth Galbraith, the eminent economist, came to Texas to seek, as he put it, ''substantial modification'' of the historical record -- ''a more modest, I trust more informed,'' view of Johnson's five years in the White House.

I was hunched over a transcribing machine, my foot on the pedal, listening to the first of the tapes Lyndon Johnson secretly made of 10,000 of his private conversations. Before deciding to create a book based on the tapes, I wanted to make sure they did not simply show Johnson posturing for the microphone, but instead captured all facets of his daily private and public life -- heroic and otherwise.

''This country,'' President Lyndon Johnson once said, ''is rich enough to do anything it has the guts to do and the vision to do and the will to do.'' You'd never catch Ronald Reagan or George Bush expressing that kind of confidence in America, despite the patriotism they so fulsomely extol.

Twenty years ago, these were facts of American life: Half of all Americans over 65 had no medical insurance, and a third of the aged lived in poverty. More than 90 percent of the black adults in many Southern counties were not registered to vote. Nationwide, at all levels of government, there were only a couple hundred black elected officials. Today most Americans would find those situations unacceptable, and indeed they have been reversed, in large part because of laws enacted in 1965, the high-water mark of Lyndon B. Johnson's drive for what he called the Great Society.

Walt W. Rostow, President Johnson's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, testified in Federal Court here yesterday that as early as a year before the Tet offensive of 1968, he informed the President of an unresolved dispute among intelligence analysts over the scope of enemy strength in South Vietnam.